Three Cairns Scholars
Lucía Castellares Tello, Perú
Goal: Create more sustainable supply chains among multinationals working in the Global South
As a sustainability and climate change senior associate at PwC in her home country of Perú, Lucía Castellares Tello '25 MEM acquired a range of technical and leadership skills. She helped measure and audit corporate sustainability indicators, conducted assurance of annual reports, crafted sustainability initiatives, and ran materiality and climate risk analyses.
Doing this work also left her with a desire to deepen her knowledge of environmental science and systems thinking. “This additional knowledge would enable me to develop more comprehensive and effective strategic plans for businesses in the future,” Castellares says.
When she learned about the Three Cairns Program for the Global South at YSE, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to fill this skills gap.
Given her background, Castellares has focused her studies on engagement with real companies. Through the Yale Center for Business and the Environment’s Regenerative Agriculture Lab, for example, she collaborated with Grupo Trimex, the biggest wheat producer in Mexico, to craft a regenerative agriculture framework for their North American farmers. This work, Castellares notes, has been augmented by the strong connections between YSE and other schools across the university.
After graduation, Castellares plans to work as a corporate sustainability manager in the food industry, ideally with a food retailer. But this is a steppingstone to a loftier goal. “Ultimately, I aspire to become a CSO (chief sustainability officer) of a multinational company,” she says. “I want to focus on the impacts the company’s value chain has in the Global South and help it engage with local, innovative solutions.”
Meet the 2024-25 Three Cairns Scholars
Jorge Andrés Forero Fajardo
'25 MEM Colombia
Mahica Iyer
'25 MEM United Arab Emirates
Ananya Rao
'25 MESc India
Srishti Singh
'25 MEM India
Benedicta Asiedu
'25 MEM Ghana
Lucía Castellares Tello
'25 MEM Perú